Tuesday, October 23, 2012

CommanderBond.net has landed an exclusive interview with Young Bond author Charlie Higson who has embarked on a mission of condense all the original Ian Fleming novels into single individual tweets. Click the headline to have a read at CBn.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Amazon has released their new Ian Fleming paperbacks and Kindle eBooks today. The series sports a new, avant-garde look and are published under Amazon's Thomas & Mercer imprint. The eBooks will initially only be available via Amazon's Kindle store. Below are links to all the paperback editions (with some up to 50% off).

Sunday, October 14, 2012

The Sunday Times Magazine (UK) has a cover profile of James Bond author Ian Fleming today. It's nice amid all the Skyfall and 50th Anniversary hype to get a nod to 007's creator. The article illustration, by the way, is by our friend Peter Lorenz of the excellent blog, Illustrated 007. Congrats Peter!

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Check out this video clip from The Cheltenham Literature Festival of Young Bond author Charlie Higson. Charlie starts out by discussing his zombie-horror series (the latest book, The Sacrifice, was released in the UK last month), but then he talks about James Bond at length. It's always a pleasure to hear Charlie talk Bond.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Great news! The very first James Bond continuation novel, Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis (as Robert Markham), is released today as an eBook by IFP. Cover art matches the artwork on the recent Raymond Benson eBook releases.

Lunch at Scott's, a quiet game of golf, a routine social call on his chief M, convalescing in his Regency house in Berkshire - the life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency … until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped and his house staff savagely murdered.The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island where the glacial, malign Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Bond finds himself working in alliance with the beautiful tawny-blonde agent of a rival secret service in the struggle to overpower this ruthless enemy who discards the unwritten rules of espionage. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond faces unarmed the monstrous devices of Colonel Sun in a test that brings him to the verge of his physical endurance. Colonel Sun was published in 1968 and is the first novel featuring the character of James Bond to appear after the death of his creator, Ian Fleming. It was published by Kingsley Amis under the name of Robert Markham.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

ZAGREB, October 3, 2012 – “I knew you all expected Mr. Bond to show up for his promotion,” said David Slinn, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Republic of Croatia, “but he is currently at an undisclosed location, performing undisclosed duties.” His excellency was addressing an audience of some hundred people, gathered in good cheer at the Café Kinoteka in Zagreb on September 19th for the unveiling of the first Croatian edition of Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever, joining numerous Olympic and Paralympic athletes freshly returned from their successes at the 2012 London Games.

The UK Embassy and the Bond publisher, Algoritam, used the opportunity to not only present a classic Fleming title to the local audiences, but to also congratulate the athletes on the Olympic achievements that inspired the nation. Mr. Slinn was joined on the stage by Vladimir Cvetković Sever, the imprint’s editor, translator and creative director, and Lana Petanić, who portrays the book’s indefatigable female lead, Tiffany Case, on the cover. The assembly was greeted by Fergus Fleming, the Chairman of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., in a letter which stated, “This latest volume is a splendid addition to the annals of Agent 007, and I wish it every success.” It was the fifth in a unique line of Ian Fleming Bond covers which Algoritam has been producing, under license from IFP, since 2008.

“The challenge for this cover,” said Cvetković Sever, “was to connote the brilliance and timelessness of diamonds without depicting any, as Tiffany Case does not wear them in the story. So it was a stroke of good fortune when we secured Lana’s participation. She is not only one of Croatia’s top models, but her looks easily rival those of any currently working supermodel anywhere in the world. With Lana aboard, we had our diamond, cut and polished; we could concentrate on the character she so fully embodies.”

This restrained approach extended to the photographer. As luck would have it, Belizar Valić has had prior experience working with Petanić in various fashion editorials over the years. The Diamonds Are Forever cover photoshoot marked one of his rare returns to the kind of work he loved to do before turning his full attention to Sonic Models, the modelling agency which he runs with his partner and this book’s stylist, Iva Tuđa. “Early on, Vladimir decided to depict the iconic Tiffany Case scene, the introduction of her character as she gazes in the mirror of her dressing table, wearing black lingerie, while Feuilles Mortes plays in the background,” said Valić. “He drove us crazy with that song, in half a dozen different covers ranging from Yves Montand to Iggy Pop! But it certainly helped create the mood. Lana had a lot of Tiffany in her, and she was able to pull off the character’s emotion without any extraneous help from my lighting. In creating a character that is designed to have only two or three photos to exist in, I let her face tell the story, while concentrating on simply staying true to her portrayal.”

The final cover design depicts Case in a very feminine purple room, its dilapidation suggested only by the state of the dressing table mirrors and its rough surfaces. Staring into her own eyes on the front cover, she notices an imaginary Bond and begins to turn on the spine thumbnail, revealing her full figure to the reader’s gaze only on the back cover. “Years ago, a Croatian stylist referred to Lana’s legs as belonging to the Aston Martin class,” noted Cvetković Sever. “I learned of his comment much later, but I found it more than fitting – and true – once she became a Bond Girl.”

The result is the softest and most feminine of the five Bond covers produced in Croatia so far, true to every aspect of Ian Fleming’s prose – from the gaudy setting of the fictional Trafalgar Hotel to the chatoyance in Tiffany’s eyes – while capturing both the period and the continuing appeal of the original text. “I’ve had people comment on how perfectly these images capture the fifties, or the seventies, or the eighties look,” added Cvetković Sever wryly. “That is the true beauty of the original Bond Girls – they belong to every era. Due to Ian Fleming’s insistence on a natural, timeless look, with little makeup, simple hairstyles and no nail varnish, these ladies have lived on as symbols of grace, courage, determination and fortitude in the pages of his prose. Despite being grounded in their time and place, they go on forever. And each model we’ve had the fortune to work with has embodied her own character flawlessly, while putting her own unique spin on it; it is our hope that in presenting the first flesh and blood Bond Girls as written, we have hewed as closely as possible to Ian Fleming’s mental image of them.”

Despite being one of the fastest translators in Croatia – last year, he shared George R.R. Martin’s “gold medal” for producing the world’s first translation of his bestselling A Dance with Dragons – Cvetković Sever takes his time with the Fleming material, producing roughly one translation per year. “Simply put, these books are a labour of love,” he concludes. “Every pixel on their covers has to be just right, and so does every term and every comma in the actual text. Diamonds Are Forever had offered its readers their initial glimpse under the shady canopy of the illicit diamond trading, and that sorry business has continued to bring misfortune to Africa and every other part of the pipeline that Fleming so memorably began to depict.” “Alas, we didn’t actually have a Bond to put an end to these things in the mid-fifties,” added Petanić, who researched her role thoroughly. “There are other women living Tiffany’s life at this very moment, and we were all quite aware of that sobering fact as we worked on this cover.”

The first Croatian edition of Diamonds Are Forever is currently available in Croatian bookstores; the search for the perfect model to portray Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love has already begun.

One of the very first early screen treatment of Casino Royale had James Bond replaced by a … Girl as the main character of the plot?

Alfred Hitchock was activately courted by Ian Fleming for directing the very first Cinematographic James Bond adventure?

George Lucas & Steven Spielberg created the adventures of Indiana Jones after being rejected by Albert Broccoli as potential directors of a James Bond movie?

Author Ian Fleming intended originally to have James Bond dying at the end of From Russia With Love.

All this and more.

More.

Much more is revealed in Kevin Collette 's very first essay on the James Bond phenomenon, which took the world by surprise at the movies way back in 1962 – the very year our writer was born.

With an exclusive foreword penned by the delightful Miss Rachel Grant – aka Peaceful Fountain of Desire in Die Another Day) the book packs 200 pages of information even the most die-hard fans of 007 will find entertaining – including exclusive ITWs with Raymond Benson, Sam Rolfe, Jeffery Deaver and others famous Bond people and distinguished 007 connoiseurs from all over the world .

A movie critic for more than thirty years, Kevin Collette has been truly mesmerized by the first James Bond movie he saw as a kid in a theater in 1971. The film was Diamonds Are Forever, and the kid never recovered since…

Monday, October 1, 2012

The six James Bond novels by Raymond Benson and the three Moneypenny Diaries novels by Kate Westbrook a.k.a. Samantha Weinberg have been released by IFP as eBooks. The eBooks sport terrific new cover art and are available for the Kindle from Amazon in the U.S. and UK.